April 08, 2017

Pre-Pill/Legal Abortion Saga - Lindsay Johnson

Back then, women in colleges attempted to conceal their pregnancies. Some were successful, had stealth birth experiences and did finish up their degrees.

Others left college abruptly, often forever sidelining themselves from the professional options which began opening up to females in the late 1970s.

One of my roommates did finish up her STEM degree years later. But she was atypical.

That was then.

Following the Pill, there was also legal abortion. No female in college should have had to skip a beat in her education or later career because she was sexually active. But, some young women are still weird about sex.

Take Lindsay Johnson. As Daily Mail reports, she gave birth to a male in the University of Illinois - Urbana campus dorm bathroom. She was there a long time. Others heard a baby crying.

When the police came to check, Johnson said she had stayed in the bathroom an excessive amount of time because she had been ill. Later police interrogated her when she was walking on campus. In her backpack was a dead infant. The autopsy revealed he had not been stillborn.

Through her lawyer, Tony Bruno, Johnson took a plea of endangering the life or health of a child. Her sentence is 10 years. She will be eligible for parole in five.

In her best-seller book "Girls and Sex," Peggy Orenstein describes young females as essentially sure of themselves in most parts of their lives. The exception is sex. They do not assert themselves with their partners about if they want sex or not at the time and what they themselves want from the experience. That might provide insight into Johnson's tragedy.